Angry Afghans blame U.S. for missing Hajji pilgrimage to Mecca

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP)  The old Afghan farmer introduced himself by the name he was not  "Hajji," a Muslim honored for having made the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. He then burst into tears.

Angry Afghans milled around him Sunday  like him, seething over trips for the annual Mecca pilgrimage promised, paid for and now canceled out of the U.S. military-controlled airport at Kandahar.

The Afghan government blamed bomb-damaged runways at the U.S.-held airport; disappointed would-be pilgrims blamed the Afghan government, and the United States.

"How can I return to my family, my village?" asked the white-bearded farmer, wearing the faded, plain turban and shawls of a man of little means, tear running after tear down the sides of his beaked, jutting nose.

"I told them I was going on the pilgrimage. How can I go home to them now? How? I am too ashamed," the man, Shahqatullah, wept.

Afghans, wealthy and poor, crowded by the hundreds with him outside Kandahar's government-run bank, whipped by Afghan security forces' severed tree branches when they pressed to go inside the dank concrete building for refunds for their dreamed-of, called-off pilgrimages.

Authorities in Kandahar province announced Saturday that no pilgrim flights would be leaving from the southern city's airport, now used by the U.S.-led military coalition as its largest base in Afghanistan.

Thwarted pilgrims around him broke in with their own condemnations of Americans and their own, struggling Afghan government.

The provincial government had taken $1,600 each from 4,214 would-be pilgrims from across southern and south-central Afghanistan for a "hajj package."

The pilgrimage draws millions each year to the shrine in Saudi Arabia, Islam's holiest site. Islam requires the journey at least once in a lifetime of every Muslim who has the means to go.

For Afghans, next week's hajj is the first since the United Nations lifted travel sanctions imposed against the Taliban government in 1999. The sanctions made exceptions for the yearly religious pilgrimage, but the ban made arrangements for the trip more difficult for the Taliban government.

Afghanistan's months-old post-Taliban government guaranteed the trip to thousands. But hundreds only have been able to leave from Kabul's airport  and none from Kandahar.

Britain, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have sent aircraft to Afghanistan to pick up some of the thousands of people who have been unable to travel to Mecca for the hajj, and the United Arab Emirates said Sunday it would as well.